The Dynamics of Economic and Cultural Development

The process of economic development is the process by which society accumulates knowledge and information while battling the eternal requirement for both knowledge and information to be physically embodied.In the presentation, Prof. C. Hidalgo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will cover at the dynamics of economic and cultural development by looking at the evolution of the networks connecting countries to the products they export and to their historical cultural production.

He will show that both of these networks are characterized by a statistically significant degree of nestedness and a path dependent evolution, suggesting that constraints to the physical embodiment of tacit knowledge limit the development of both industrial structures and cultural production. In the case of industrial production, he will show also that the structure of the network connecting countries to products is a strong predictor of future economic growth, after controlling for initial levels of income and education. In the case of cultural production, He will show that there is a strong correlation between the development of cultural domains and the emergence of different communication technologies.